In Between

Every child who can't sleep invents someone to sit by the bed. This is the story of what happens to them when the child grows up.

Ella lives on the grey ground between other people's dreams, a narrow strip nobody dreams of, where cities drift, trains run nowhere and a single wrong step can turn you into someone else. She keeps a notebook so she won't forget who she is. She keeps watch on one house across the valley, and one blue window.

When the light in that window comes on again, and a small fist knocks twice, then once more, Ella goes back to the boy who called her. But Noah isn't six any more. He's thirty-seven, lying in a Paris hospital after a fall into the Seine, and the doctors have given him until Friday.

With Jude, a man who took his name off the spine of a book, Ella crosses the dreams standing between her and the house: a commuter train, a flooded photo shop, an airport that never stops boarding. But the closer she gets to waking Noah, the clearer it becomes that saving him may be the one thing that erases her.

In Between is a quiet, luminous novella about the ones we stop calling for, and what it costs to finally let morning come.